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Microsoft Surface Laptop review

Microsoft is offering more hardware than ever before and now has a touchscreen clamshell laptop to tempt you with. The Surface Laptop is a more affordable and non-detachable version of the Surface Book so will appeal to more people. See also: Best laptops 2017.

Who should buy the Surface Laptop though? Microsoft launched it as its education conference and says it's perfect for students, but it’s certainly not a Chromebook or cheap laptop rival, despite a discount for those eligible.

It’s probably best thought of as Microsoft’s Windows version of the MacBook Air - a thin and light laptop with decent performance and battery life. Also see: Best Laptop Deals.

Price and Availability

None of Microsoft’s Surface devices fit in the 'budget' category and that hasn’t changed with the Surface Laptop. It starts at £979 and if you opt for the highest-spec model, you can spend a whopping £2,149 - you do get free delivery and returns, though.

In the US it starts at $999 and goes up to $2,199.

There are four different versions to choose from so, to an extent, you can customise what you want in terms of the processor, memory and storage. We’ll look at these in detail in the hardware section below.

At nearly £1,000 for the cheapest model, it’s clear the Surface Laptop isn’t for the masses - and the price doesn’t include any accessories like the Surface Pen. Whether a cheaper Core m model arrives at later date remains to be seen.

The new Surface Pro is more affordable at £799 (but that's also without the keyboard or pen) and the Surface Laptop doesn’t seem so bad when you realise the Huawei MateBook X starts at €1399, the Acer Swift 7 is £999 and the MacBook Air is £949.

Design and Build

The Surface Book looked like a normal laptop, but the screen contained all the processing power and detached from the keyboard with a clever mechanism. The Surface Laptop opts for the traditional clamshell design with a fixed hinge. It’s what you might consider to be a ‘normal’ laptop, which for a lot of people will be a good thing.

Like the MacBook Air the device has a tapered design so is 14.5mm at the thicker end and is around 7mm by our measurement at the thinner end when shut. Microsoft has also made sure it’s lightweight at 1.25kg so it’s a great candidate for carrying around with you without it turning into a workout.

The Surface Laptop, like previous products in the range, is recognisable and we’re taken by the stylish design. The aluminium casing is similar to rivals like the Xiaomi Mi Notebook Air but the mirrored Windows logo on the lid provides its identity. Somehow, the Surface Laptop looks both professional and fashionable at the same time.

It feels well constructed and like it will last a long time. The stand-out feature in design has to be the Alcantara fabric cover which surrounds the keyboard. This looks and feels like the Surface Pro 4 Type Cover on a and feels, as Microsoft puts it, luxurious. Whether it can look as great in 6 months, a year or more with regular palm contact is a question, though.

Microsoft offers the Surface Laptop in four colours we took a look at the Platinum option, which is a nicer way of saying grey, but it also comes in more interesting Graphite Gold, Burgundy and Cobalt Blue. We particularly like the latter two and the way the aluminium matches the fabric colour.

This is the gold version:

And this is the blue one:

Effectively using the keyboard from the Surface Pro is no bad thing. In the chassis of the Surface Laptop it provides a smooth, bouncy and comfortable experience with nicely spaced out keys a 1.5mm of travel. The keys sit in a sunken section so lay level with the palm rest and there’s also a backlight with three levels of brightness.

Using the trackpad from the Surface Book is perfectly acceptable, too, as it’s large, responsive and a joy to use with Windows 10 gestures as well as basic two-finger scrolling. The push buttons makes a fairly loud click but it’s not the end of the world.

The screen reclines around 135 degrees which is pretty good. Even if you’d like it to go further the decent viewing angles of the display make up for it.

Specs and Performance

Stylish and lightweight design is a good start, but the Surface Laptop needs to provide some impressive hardware to warrant it’s price. Let’s take a look at what Microsoft has chosen and how the Surface Laptop performs.

Screen

Open up the Surface Laptop and you’re presented with a display that will be unusual for some. It’s a 13.5in PixelSense screen like the one in the Surface Book with an aspect ratio of 3:2 instead of the more traditional 16:9.

This might not be as well suited to video compared to a widescreen, but the experience is perfectly fine. What it does it work very well with a lot of software, particularly if you’re working on a word document or spreadsheet.

Microsoft calls it an edge-to-edge display but while the bezels are reasonably small, they are certainly visible and bigger than many rivals.

The PixelSense display uses a 2256x1504 resolution on the Surface Laptop creating a 201ppi pixel density. It’s nicely crisp and also features 10-point multi-touch and support for the Surface Pen - although this is not included.

It’s worth noting that the Surface Laptop is not compatible with the Surface Dial in terms of on-screen use.

Processor, memory and storage

As you would expect, the Surface Pro is powered by 7th-generation Intel Kaby Lake processors. You’ll need to choose between a Core i5-7200U and a more powerful Core i7-7660U.

Both are dual-core chips with a 2.5GHz base frequency so the main differences are that the i7 has a higher Turbo speed of 4- vs 3.1GHz and has Intel Iris Plus 640 graphics against HD 620. Microsoft highlights the latter saying you can play more PC games with it.

There are also three capacities of memory and three SDD sizes to choose from but you can’t choose any combination you want. For example, the Core i5 can’t come with 16GB of RAM.

Although we’d prefer more choice it’s understandable that Microsoft easily offer more combinations. Storage is the main issue we feel as you need to factor in the amount taken up by Windows 10 - our 256GB model has 187GB available.

Here are the four Surface Laptop models you can choose from:

Core i5, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD

Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD

Core i7, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD

Core i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD

Benchmarks and battery life

The performance on offer with the Surface Laptop is impressive, even without buying the Core i7 model. As you can see in the benchmark results below, the Core i5 model can almost keep up with the new Surface Pro with an i7 inside - almost £1,000 more expensive.

In short, the average user won’t need to stump up the extra for a Core i7 model unless they are doing intensive tasks or desperately need the 512GB of storage. Don’t expect to do any AAA PC gaming here but you can play games on the Surface Laptop. Check out the best gaming laptops.

One of the biggest claims Microsoft has made about the Surface Laptop is an astonishingly large battery life - a whopping 14.5 hours of video playback tested using the Core i5 model with 8GB of RAM.

As usual, the smallprint points out that figures will vary depending on a number of different things. In our standard test, looping a video at a brightness of 120cd/m2 (60 percent in this case), the Surface Laptop lasted a staggering 16 hours.

That's the best result we've ever seen.

Ports and other features

The thin and tapered design of the Surface Laptop might make it look nice and keep the weight down but it has a drawback when it comes to the connectivity on offer.

We’re not talking about wireless as the Surface Laptop has 11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 LE, we mean physically.

Microsoft has chosen to go with a single USB 3.0 port, mini DisplayPort and a 3.5mm headphone jack. This means no SD card slot or USB-C, either. Instead, Microsoft has chosen its magnetic Surface Connect port for charging claiming that the Type-C standard isn’t mature enough yet.

As you’d expect, you get features like a 720p Windows Hello webcam which can be used to automatically log in using facial recognition. There’s also dual microphones and Omnisonic stereo speakers with Dolby Audio Premium.

Software: Windows 10 S

A downside to the Surface Laptop is that it comes with Windows 10 S. A slightly odd new edition of the operating system and is almost the same apart from a few restrictions. Essentially Microsoft thinks you'll be safer this way.

You can’t join a domain but far more annoying is that you can only install apps from the Windows Store. That means you can’t even download an alternative browser to Edge like Chrome or Firefox.

The smallprint notes that “Some accessories and apps compatible with Windows 10 may not work, and performance may vary,” and “Certain default settings, features, and apps cannot be changed.”

Luckily, Microsoft offers users a free upgrade to Windows 10 Pro so this potentially huge blunder is negated. Just make sure you upgrade before 31 December 2017.

One year of Office 365 Personal is included with the Surface Laptop whether you upgrade to Pro or not.

SHOULD I BUY MICROSOFT SURFACE LAPTOP?

The Surface Laptop isn't the most affordable laptop around but it's not outrageous either compared to rivals. Microsoft has done a great job of creating a well-made, thin and desirable laptop. We'd tweak the ports on offer and upgrade from Windows 10 S to Pro, but we can live with the niggles considering the specs and excellent battery life.